DnD 3.5: Mercantile Background

[Privateer]

What are people's thoughts on this feat: http://dnd.savannahsoft.eu/feat-1927-mercantile-background.html ?

It seems very powerful for a wizard that intends to craft items. Since you sell at 75% and can buy at 75%, that means you can essentially trade anything you craft for anything else of equall vallue, as long as you only get one item per month, no? Which effectively replaces all item creation feats.

You don't even have to take any item creation feats - just scribe many scrolls, sell them, and buy the item/weapon/rod/wand/whatever you wanted with proceeds.

Of course, there are limiations. It's very easy for DM to control by deciding what kind of items are available to buy.

[Ernir]

In my opinion, it's broken.

Not broken in the sense that it's entirely impossible to play with (few things are that bad, hell, you might be able to play a Tainted Scholar.), but it produces unbounded results if used repeatedly or looked at with any kind of optimization in mind.

[dsmiles]

That would have been so AWESOME when I was making my Merchant Prince (Classed as a Rogue/Wilder). I wish I could have had that book available!

[hewhosaysfish]

Fun story:

A few years back the university gaming society I am/was part of ran our own living campaign for a while. Got up to maybe as many as 30ish players before folding due to having too many players and not enough DMs.

And there was on guy who gave his character the Mercantile Background feat. And he made a standing offer to buy loot from any and all other PCS for 60% of the list price (rather than the standard 50%). And of course, he would then sell it on for 75%.

Eventually he started offering "Raise Dead insurance" to other PCs. Not becuase he wanted more money; the payments were so low he was probably going to make a loss. He'd just run out of sensible things to spend his ludicrous wealth on and wanted to share the love with the other players.

[Tyndmyr]

And there was on guy who gave his character the Mercantile Background feat. And he made a standing offer to buy loot from any and all other PCS for 60% of the list price (rather than the standard 50%). And of course, he would then sell it on for 75%.

This is the logical outcome. Also, coupled with *any* feat that reduces crafting cost, it becomes a very effective way of turning small amounts of xp into large amounts of money.

In actual play it ends up being almost purely a feat for wealth trade, which is...powerful, but still quite playable. The SBG feat is somewhat more restricted in nature, but it's basically the same idea.

[Privateer]

I still think that absent big groups with lots of loot, the most powerful feature of this feat is the ability to buy and sell at the same price rather than the sell price increase itself.

Take dark craft XP(of which only one doze can be applied to an item made and it's very difficult to get a big doze), apply it to a cheap item that takes exactly one day to make. Make a hundred such items, then trade them for the expensive item you really wanted. You just got a 100k item for 50k and spent zero experience on it.

EDIT:
Sure, the item is evil and at least 100 people were sacrificed in the most dispicable manner to make it, so the DM may well throw some palladin order after you. :smalltongue: But still, xp-free crafting is pretty neat, especially if coupled with some other cost-reduction feats.